Global Dialogues Series: Reimagining Environmental Futures
Climate change poses the most critical question ever to confront culture. We continue to struggle with what it means to live in the age of the Anthropocene: as the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns us, in what has been described as a "code red for humanity," many planetary shifts currently in motion are already irreversible for centuries to millennia. What does it mean to imagine futures in conjunction with layers of the deep past and an already irreversible present? How and under what conditions can we still conceptualize global connections for a collective future in a time of prolonged ecological crisis? Furthermore, as climate injury and environmental racism disproportionately affect marginalized communities, we must continue to mediate the continual interplay between global collectivity and local positionality in order to imagine a just future for all. When we consider the responsibilities, accountabilities, and affordances of living in precarious environmental conditions, how can we embrace a planetary envisioning of community and futurity?
Speakers:
Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is also a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and an associate faculty of the Department of English. For the past decade, Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. He is the author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age.
Ursula K. Heise is Chair of the Department of English at UCLA. She holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies and serves as Interim Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. She is the author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science.
Rob Nixon is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment. He is affiliated with the Princeton Environmental Institute's initiative in the environmental humanities. He is the author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard), which was selected by Choice as an outstanding book of 2011. Slow Violence has received four prizes: an American Book Award; the 2012 Sprout prize from the International Studies Association for the best book in environmental studies; the 2012 Interdisciplinary Humanities Award for the best book to straddle disciplines in the humanities; and the 2013 biennial ASLE Award for the best book in environmental literary studies.